Over theorising

There is still a lot of sailing to do, but a scenario is taking shape for a fairy tale finish to the revival of the Cal 40 class in the 42nd Transpacific Yacht Race to Hawaii.

Would you believe, just like the good old days, first place on overall corrected handicap time?

Stan and Sally Honey are sailing their own Illusion, accompanied by a couple of other Transpac legends: Skip Allan, who won overall with Holiday Too in 1967 and Jon Andron, who sailed Argonaut to the fastest Transpac ever by a Cal 40 in 1969, the third consecutive year that the breakthrough creation of designer Bill Lapworth and builder Jack Jensen had claimed that honour.

James Denning did it again with Montgomery Street in 1985, and now here comes Illusion with a nine-hour lead in corrected time and 572 miles to go in the 2,225-nautical mile race. Bill Turpin's Transpac 52, Alta Vita, is second and Peter Johnson's J/160, Maitri, third in the calculations from positions reported in Friday morning's daily roll call.

To sweeten the prospect, Illusion, which had a five-day head start, also is projected to finish on Monday ahead, boat for boat, of Philippe Kahn's Pegasus 77, the Division 1 leader, and Roy E. Disney's Pyewacket, the boat Stan Honey usually navigates. That is still too soon to call with confidence, however, and at the moment it appears that several other boats that also started July 1 will finish in front of the Cal 40s, although they'll owe the latter a ton of handicap time.

Mort Andron, Jon's father, is following the race the contest closely. He raced Argonaut in '67 and this week recalled meeting Jon at the Ala Wai Yacht Harbor after the victorious finish in '69.

"I flew over to meet them, and when I was standing there on the dock a reporter from the Honolulu paper thought I was Jon and started asking me questions

"How was the race?"
"It was a great race."

"How long did it take you to get here?"
"Oh, about six hours."

Some of the boats out there this year aren't having many laughs right now. Vicki, Al Schultz and entertainer Vicki Lawrence's Andrews 70 from Long Beach (she isn't on it), was one of the boats that bet on a shorter, more northerly route than the current leaders. Now it's too late to change.

"We continue to be the definition of 'leverage,' " a message from the boat said Friday. "The wind direction has given us two options: gybe and duck transoms or dig in. We have chosen to dig in. Based on past races, a northern position at this stage is seldom good, but this year's weather pattern is not typical and we remain confident."

Pyewacket continued to follow in Pegasus 77's wake, perhaps looking for the right time to break away after Kahn's Reichel/Pugh 77 stretched its lead from 43 to 55 miles Friday.

Lady Bleu II, an Aloha A entry that started July 1, is still nearest to Honolulu of the 54 boats, but barely. Unlike Vicki, Roger and Brenda Kuske's Dynamique 62 from San Diego bit the bullet and dived deeply south across the rhumb line for better breeze the last two days and held onto its lead by eight miles over Ross Pearlman's Sun Odyssey 52.2, Between the Sheets.

Bearing down on both of those boats is There and Back Again, Robert Rice's Tripp 40 from Long Beach. The Division 5 racer has gone alternately up and down relative to the rhumb line the last four days, as navigator Scott Atwood plays the unstable conditions. Their trip has been quite an adventure, according to e-mails sent home from the boat.

One report: "Over the last few days, we’ve had two fires and Doug [Gardner] was attacked last night by a giant killer squid that jumped on the boat."

Otherwise, the reports mentioned that "the only thing that has gone wrong is water in the radio (music, not the communication radio), so now the only music is singing to each other, which is agony. We also put the laptop on deck and watched a movie. It was a pretty amazing night watching a movie on a laptop on the farthest place from land on the planet."

JULY 11 POSITION REPORTS

(Listed in order of corrected handicap time; actual miles to go noted)